The moment John caught a proper glance of (Vriska) and Gamzee going at it in the bushes, he was done. He simply had no further capacity to deal with any of it. He just fucked off.

A few hours of aimless wandering through the sky brought him back here, to his old house. He hasn’t lived here in years, but it feels exactly as it had when he last left it. It’s like no time has passed at all. John leans back in his dad’s desk chair, stares at the ceiling and listens to the war.

The steady drone of weaponized airships up above has become so commonplace in everyday life that he barely even notices it anymore. But now he focuses, trying to pick out the individual sounds. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell which ship belongs to which side, or how many there are. He doesn’t know whether they’re coming or going. Rose, Kanaya, and their daughter are probably up there somewhere by now.

The washing machine chugs along in the next room. In John’s experience, troll blood is incredibly difficult to wash out of clothes. His t-shirt is probably going to be Vriska-colored for the rest of its life.

Somehow, no matter what, he always seems to end up back in this house. It’s been through the Medium and two different universes, and come out of it with only a slight warping to the foundations. Everything is coated in dust. He hasn’t bothered to turn any lights on, or change any of the bulbs that have burned out over the past few years. He thought he heard someone moving around upstairs a while ago, but he didn’t get up to check. He hasn’t gotten up for... how long has passed? He has no idea.

Creak. Creaaaak. God, this house is rattly. It could be a wild animal up there. It could be a thief. John doesn’t think he has anything he’d regret losing. At least not anything that he hasn’t already lost.

His dad’s study looks the same as it had the day he moved out. Figurines, jauntily-hung photographs of famous funnymen, even the dent in the floor from the time Rose dropped a safe on a bunch of troublesome imps. He’d always meant to hire someone to fix it, he just... never got around to it. It’s the perfect room for a slow-motion existential crisis.

If that’s what you can even call whatever it is he’s going through. Maybe it’s not so much of a crisis as a critical cessation of his ability to give a shit.

Where an hour ago he’d been feeling blissfully unburdened by his solipsistic revelation, now the significance of everything’s insignificance overwhelms him. He wishes he could find comfort in the frivolity like Rose has, but it’s impossible for him to delude himself. If nothing matters, what is the point of doing anything? Where is he supposed to go from here? How do you figure out how to fill your time when you have all of a meaningless eternity ahead of you?

He’s not sure why his brain thought he’d find an answer in this place. He swivels back and forth in his father’s dusty desk chair, staring listlessly up at the featureless white expanse of the ceiling of the study. His mind runs in exhausting circles until he dozes off to a lullaby of distant sonic booms.

When next he’s jostled awake, it’s by a figure that looks uncomfortably like—

As John blinks away the sleep from his eyes, the man looming over him comes into focus. It’s not his dad—it’s Jake Crocker. Who actually is his dad, but in a far more esoterically bullshit way than the man who used to fill this study with pipes and black licorice. John sits up straight in the chair and rubs at his eyes.

Jake scrunches up his face in the same way Harry Anderson does when he’s lying. Across the room, Tavros Crocker fumbles his grasp on a particularly hideous fanciful harlequin. One of its pointy shoes snaps off.

John thinks he might still be dreaming. Though if his subconscious were controlling the scene, there would be a few alterations.

Jake snaps the elastic on his pair of red underpants. It’s the only thing he’s wearing.

Jake winces.

Jake’s wince deepens.

Over by the desk, Tavros’s eyebrows have disappeared up under his bangs, but he doesn’t say anything. He has the air of a boy who has spent all of his life not saying anything.

Jake is one whole wince now, and John knows he should invite him to sit down and maybe offer him something to drink. Or at least a pair of pants. But all this is is another reminder of how inescapably preposterous every aspect of this reality has become.

John produces a dry laugh.

Jake was apparently not expecting John’s sharp tone. He flinches back like a kicked dog. Or a dog who has been kicked so many times he assumes any helping hand is a slap.

All the same, John finds it hard to feel much sympathy. Who is Jake? The one standing in front of him now, anyway. Has he always been this contemptibly pathetic, or is this too a function of the absurdity of this contorted reality? It’s hard to be sure. Are Jake’s “struggles” worth any more of John’s guilt and emotional energy than a Sim stuck in a pool without a ladder?

John isn’t listening to Jake anymore. He’s looking at Jake’s son, who has returned to going methodically through the stuff on the desk, moving objects around, looking like he wants to shrink down into nothing. Tavros, who looks more like him than even Harry Anderson does.

Something in John’s stomach churns. The ridiculous fate of this facsimile of his friend is one thing, but Tavros...

If things really are the way they seem, isn’t he John’s fault, too? Did his reckless decision really author a child, just for it to suffer?

John finds himself feeling a little sick.

He brings them into the kitchen, which still has all of the old appliances from decades ago—the stand mixer, the automatic can opener, the milkshake frother. He never uses any of this junk; it clutters the place up and he should have cleaned it all out years ago. He just kept coming up with excuses for why he had to leave it as it was.

John has never been much of a drinker, but fortunately Jake English is never found without a bottle these days. He’s got a forty-year-old whiskey that he “grabbed on his way out.” Apparently his unwillingness to steal from Jane did not extend to her liquor cabinet. Tavros takes one look at the bottle in his father’s hand and heads upstairs. Maybe that’s for the best—it’s getting hard for John to look straight at him.

John accepts the offered glass and takes a sip. Regardless of the existential status of this reality, the alcohol tastes just as harsh and bitter as he remembers it. Jake swirls the rocks in his glass, looking queasy despite his proclamation of tolerance.

That’s certainly not a question John ever expected to hear come out of Jake’s mouth. He hadn’t thought him capable of that degree of introspection.

Jake grimaces. In the dim kitchen light his five o’clock shadow looks like a bruise.

The two of them share a moment of obligatory silence for someone long dead and gone.

John wonders if everything being out of his control would make him feel better. Even if he weren’t presently stuck sucking on this bitter cosmic red pill, he can’t imagine being particularly happy with this worldstate. Maybe it just would’ve made it all the more soul-crushing.

Or maybe he is doing exactly what Jake has always done. In a certain light, isn’t ascribing all this mess to some unconscious influence he might have had over the metaphysical shape of reality just a way to brush off his simpler failures as a man and a father?

It’s hard for John to disagree. It probably wouldn’t do much good to say it, though. It’s not like John wants to torture the guy, whatever the status of his realness attribute.

John’s mouth open and closes dumbly. That’s it?

Jake grins, and the effect is incendiary. It’s brilliant. His glee is lighting up the room. John blinks. It’s literally lighting up the room. A faint but steady glow pulses from Jake’s body, radiating like heat from a fire. John can’t help but recoil a little, like a vampire in the sunlight.

He wishes bitterly that it could be so easy for him. To just forget all his fears and regrets, and forge forward with the honest, dumb conviction that if he just tries hard enough all his problems can be chased away.

Music swells out of nowhere. For a moment John thinks the ridiculous noise is coming from Jake too, but he quickly pieces together that Tavros must’ve found the old record player upstairs. Jake sets his untouched glass of whiskey aside and starts tapping his fingertips on the kitchen countertop, his aura of hope pulsing brighter. Then, with a dignified flourish, he raises an arm.

Jake snatches John’s hand and pulls him in, catching him off guard. John floats, an instinctive reaction to when he’s knocked off balance.

This is not the sort of jazz you dance to, and it is definitely not the sort of jazz you waltz to. John isn’t sure there is that type of jazz. Jake leads relentlessly, but it’s the glow of his ridiculous god tier magic that brings John down enough for his feet to touch the ground. Whether John wants it or not, there’s something inescapably infectious about Jake’s senselessly optimistic energy. Even if they do end up stepping on each other’s feet, gamboling around like newborn giraffes, who cares? What’s the harm in a little dancing?

Jake launches into a real doozy of a spin, which John supposes may well have knocked the last of his sense out of him.

Jake gives John a twirl, which sends him spinning across the floor in his socks. He stumbles and falls over, which is a bit of a comical display with his windy reflexes. It makes Jake laugh uproariously.

Being flung from Jake’s orbit of Hope and Change is a little like being dashed with a bucket of ice water, though. All of John’s gloom and malaise surges back to the fore like air filling a vacuum. He feels hungover.

John lies immobile on the floor tile. Jake draws up to look down at him in confusion, striking a pose that is both dazzlingly modelesque and doubtlessly completely unintentional.

John hauls himself up to his feet and moves to the living room. Jake follows, but John now ensures that’s there’s a healthy enough physical distance between himself and Jake’s black hole of psychic optimism.

John sighs and drops down onto the couch. He stretches out so Jake can’t take the seat beside him.

Hearing the name is like a blow to the chest. Little Harry Anderson. His son, who he held and fed and taught and raised into a young man. Despite it all, he’s always been so unbelievably proud of that boy.

If Roxy isn’t real, then his son must be even faker.

Something about the thought makes John feel more rotten than anything else. Maybe it’s some aspect of his basic biology, buried down at the core of his lizard brain, that makes him want to reject what he knows is true. The allure of the denial—of the anaesthetic hope radiating from Jake’s epically sculpted body—is difficult to turn away from.